This is an archive of Archy with some minor bug fixes and tweaks, some universal and some specific to running on a modern MacOS. Note: I haven't had a chance to test on other platforms so some of the fixes may be MacOS specific.

The main changes are:

• Quasimodes ignore unicode characters, which allows for the Alt and Control keys to be used for leap and command entry on MacOS (may break on non-qwerty keyboards). These are set as the default, although note that the inline documentation still refers to the Windows bindings
• Dependency free integration with the MacOS clipboard
• Logs and the user document are stored in their own directories. You can pass the a fully-qualified directory to save the user document as an argument with -u
• Fixed the timing of the tutorials on non-Windows systems
• Readme converted to Markdown
• Relicensed to the MIT License as per Tweet

• Organization of the Source Code
• Requirements for Compiling and Running Archy
• Compiling and Running Archy

Here's the source tree and its directories, with a description of each:

/ (root directory)

The root directory contains most of the source code for Archy, as well as some extra files that Archy needs.

/commands

This directory contains source code for Archy's built-in commands.

/commands/aspell

This directory contains code needed by Archy's spell checker; it currently contains a number of files specific to the Windows version of Archy, including an entire GNU Aspell dictionary. Hopefully some of this will be moved out of the source tree at some point.

/commands/tutorial

This directory contains all code implementing Archy's tutorials, and also currently contains a number of large Ogg Vorbis files containing the audio for the tutorials. These large files may be moved out of the source tree at some point.

/fonts

This directory contains the default TrueType fonts that Archy uses.

/icons

This directory contains images used for the Archy application icon on many platforms. See the README.txt file in this directory for more information.

/keycaps

This directory contains pictures of keys used by Archy's default initial document.

/sdl-patches

This directory contains various patches written for the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library to allow Archy to work properly on some platforms. See the README.txt file in this directory for more information.

/utest

This directory contains code of unit tests. See the README.txt file in this directory for more information. See below how to run unit tests.

/windows_installer_files

This directory contains files needed for creating a self-installing executable for Archy on the Windows platform. See the README.txt file in this directory for more information.

To compile and run Archy, you'll need the following:

• REQUIRED - Python version 2.3 or above (http://www.python.org).

• REQUIRED - Pygame version 1.6 or above (http://www.pygame.org).

  Note that in order to run Pygame, you may need a number of prerequisites, depending on your specific platform. Windows users can just download the executable installer, but other platforms (such as Linux) will need to make sure they have a number of prerequisites, such as SDL. Although Archy doesn't currently use all of Pygame's optional dependencies, this may change in the near future, so you're better off installing all of them.

  If you have Brew, installing these dependencies on MacOS is simply:

    brew install python
    pip2 install pygame
  

  If you want to be absolutely frugal, however, the Pygame components with optional dependencies which Archy does not currently use are:

  • The pygame.surfarray module. This means that you don't need Python's Numeric package.

• The pygame.movie module. This means that you don't need the smpeg library.

• REQUIRED (Windows) - Archy's custom SDL library

  This is a custom version of the Simple Directmedia Layer, patched with some of the patches from the 'sdl_patches' directory of the source tree, which allows Archy to work properly on Windows platforms. The custom SDL.dll is contained in the root directory of the Archy distribution; just copy it into the pygame folder (often found in a directory such as C:\Python23\lib\site-packages\pygame).

• REQUIRED (Windows) - Mark Hammond's Python for Windows Extensions (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/).

• OPTIONAL (Windows, Linux) - Psyco (http://psyco.sourceforge.net/)

  This library currently only works with platforms running on Intel x86 processors; if Archy detects its presence, it will use Psyco to accelerate a number of its processor-intensive functions, allowing it to run a good deal faster.

• OPTIONAL (non-Windows) - wxPython (http://www.wxpython.org/)

  Non-Windows platforms utilize wxPython to access the clipboard. If this library isn't present on a non-Windows system, Archy's COPY IN and COPY OUT commands won't work.

• OPTIONAL - GNU aspell (http://aspell.sourceforge.net/)

  Currently, the source tree includes the Windows version of this software (Windows users don't need to install it--Archy finds it automatically), and the source code doesn't actually support a non-Windows version yet. This will be changed in the near future. In any case, if the aspell library isn't found, Archy's spellchecking features will not work.

To run Archy, execute the script archy.py located in the root directory of the Archy source tree. Archy accepts following command-line options:

-d, --developer-mode

disables web-based bug reporting, enables certain disabled by default commands such as SIMULATE BUGGY COMMAND and SIMULATE CRASH.

Execute utest.py without parameters to run all Archy unit tests:

python utest.py

To run a specific Archy unit test modules specify names of the modules as parameter utest.py parameters separated by spaces. For example:

python utest.py utest.commands.quitTest utest.audioTest

The Linux version of Archy is still in a somewhat rough and experimental state, and as such users running Archy on Linux may need to do some extra work.

In order to properly access the state of the caps lock key, Archy currently needs to use the xmodmap utility. See the file linux_specific.py for more information on how this is done; you may need to modify this file slightly to work on your system. Before using Archy for the first time, you may want to execute the following command from a shell prompt:

xmodmap -pke > original_keybindings.txt

If Archy ever crashes or somehow leaves your keyboard in a state in which the caps lock key doesn't work, you can fix things by executing the following from a shell prompt:

xmodmap original_keybindings.txt